Because I work from home and get lonely in the day and generally don't have a ton of friends in the English town that I live in, I've taken to occasionally doing things 'outside of my comfort zone', keeping in mind that my comfort zone is about the size of one of your feet if you stood up right now and tried to balance.

I'd heard from a friend of a friend about a casting call for women who lived in London and had American accents. This was for a beauty commercial and they were looking for Normal People, which I generally consider myself to be.

I arrived, sweaty and almost late in the requested uniform of white t-shirt and no makeup, and sat down in a fun! lofty! waiting room with a gaggle of other American girls. We all laughed about not being able to convert our American clothing sizes to the British equivalent (hint: add four), while our charming British ringleader just told us to specify if it was U.S. size, with a smile on her face and probably a slowly sinking heart.

Then it was my turn! Up, up, up I go to the casting room where I'm faced with the nice lady and a camera man probably named Dave or something though (of course) I can't remember.

Filming began, and I was asked to 'engage' with the camera. Since I have a hard enough time engaging with anything that's not a dog or cat (so cute!), this required some nudging by the nice lady. She asked me routine questions about myself and rather than looking into the camera like the required Normal Person I'd said I was, I chose to stare her down and talk to her as if my life depended on it, or as if she were the only person I knew at a party or something.

Talking done. Time for the Acting to begin.

Since this was a commercial for a beauty brand that only featured Normal People, I just had to Be Myself while acting as incredibly unnatural as possible. Unnatural acts included slowly (slowly) Acting like I was applying shower gel over my arms. Then Acting like I hated the smell and feel of the shower gel, except then why would I keep applying it? Then turning around and doing the classic look-over-the-shoulder thing you see in commercials where people are showering or whatever. Then Big Smile! Then it was over and time for "stills" (which are photos for those of you not in the biz).

Nice lady left the room so it was just me and Dave.

Dave told me to face this way, then that way, then hair up! then hair down. Then to give him a good shot of my arms, which was right around the time that I made a super awful joke about my arm muscles. Ugh.

The last time he asked me to turn around, I was dying to add "and take off your shirt" because isn't that what happens now? But thank god I didn't for, like, 1,000 reasons.

Anyways, it was over, then I went home and haven't heard back. But I got outside of my super teeny comfort zone for a couple of hours, then I went and bought some £4 slip-ons. We all win.